I frequently find my own tendency towards sleeping in rather regrettable. I'm no spring chicken, and I'm not exactly capable of forbearing sleep for prolonged periods anymore and merely making it up with a short nap.... skimp on sleep one night, and I pay for it for days afterward. It's always felt like something of a cheat that much of my limited time in this life is wasted lying on my back sawing logs. You never know what it is you're missing.

Like the sun and the moon being in the sky at the same time.

I woke up in what felt like the late afternoon, to my disgruntlement. My alarm clock had failed to wake me. My duties such as they are to advise the Princesses required me to be awake at truly odd hours.  And alas, due to my hours, the staff had been instructed  to leave sleeping humans lie, so they had not woken me. Grumbling I rose from my bed, noting the odd twilit state of the sky outside my windows, and did my best to drown my oversleep headache in water and aspirin, hastily trying to recollect what meetings or appointments I might have missed. A quick shower, a jump into one of my suits and a hasty breakfast of fruit from my coffee table, and it would be time to face the day.

The irony is that as poorly as I do without sufficient sleep, I do even worse if I get even a little too much; I wake up tired, and spend the day with a headache that literally does not cease until I lie down to sleep again that night. And indeed, I had awoken with a dry throat and a thumping headache; common signs I experience when I have overslept a great deal.  It must be God's own joke that I do not imbibe in alcohol, yet am cursed to wake up with my own little miniature hangover. Coffee and aspirin did little to alleviate the discomfort, but I indulged both to excess as I dragged myself about my suite. This was shaping up to be a red-letter day already.

It says something of the state of my mind that it took me nearly all that time to realize that the sun and moon were both shining through my living room windows.

To reiterate, the sun and the moon of Equus are manually controlled. They do not, I repeat do NOT, appear in the sky at the same time.(1)  If the sun and moon are in the sky simultaneously in Equestria, this denotes Very Bad Things. Things on the order of Nightmare Moon, or worse.

The severity of the situation was just dawning on me when my guards began hammering on my chamber door. I opened the door to find Bright Dawn and Moth standing outside. "Sir! Your presence is needed at once!"

"What the deuce is going on? Is it another attack?" I asked. "Have the Princesses told you anything?"

Both of them looked... I can't begin to describe the expression on their faces.  "Th-that's the thing," Bright Dawn said. "They're missing."

I felt cold slide down my spine and spread down my entire back. "Missing," I said.

"Disappeared. No sign, no warning, nopony knows anything." Bright Dawn gulped.

It occurred to me then to ask my next question. "....Which princesses are missing?" We did, after all, have four of them at that point. Cadence was visiting, so five.

Moth's response was quiet and level and turned the ice water down my spine to frozen mercury. "All of them."

 

---

 

I marched for the throne room, my guards all flanking me... Hat Trick, Bright Dawn, Cloud Wing, Jonquil, all of them. Apparently they had been absent due to aiding in the search for the missing.  It had belatedly dawned on someone in charge that I myself might be at risk, and they had been sent in force to retrieve me. Jonquil was hovering by my head, giving me a quick breakdown of everything that had happened during my prolonged nap. "...The first sign anything wrong was this morning when the moon didn't set," she said. "Then reports came in of something happening to the Everfree. Princess Twilight and Princess Rainbow--" (yes, they had finally gone through with a coronation ceremony) "--flew out to investigate..."

"And let me guess, never returned," I said angrily. Oh, I was going to twist some pony's ear off about them letting two new princesses go out unescorted--!

"Don't get your dander up," Bright Dawn said, catching my expression. "They took a dozen guards with them each. None of them returned." That gave me pause indeed.

"One did," Jonquil corrected. "They sent him back to report. The Everfree was... spreading."

Moth nodded. "The guard who returned said some sort of strange black vines were growing out of the forest, taking over Ponyville. Strange unnatural clouds were spreading too... the Princesses went in to investigate, but never came out."

"Are the vines still spreading?" I asked.

"See for yourself," Moth said, pointing to a nearby window. I stepped over and looked out. Down far below, in the direction that Ponyville normally lay, I saw a mass of dark clouds blotting out the sky. Below was a mass of vegetation; enormous thorny vines that seemed to slowly spread even as I watched. The sight chilled my heart.  I tore myself from the view and resumed heading for the throne room. "Who's in charge now?" I asked. "What are they doing?" I winced at the notion of Prince Blueblood at the helm.

"That's the thing," Hat Trick said. "The Princesses left explicit instructions that in the unlikely event of something happening to all of them, the Bearers of the Elements were to take command." I felt my eyebrows rise. It made sense, I supposed. The Bearers were powerful symbols in Equestrian culture; ponies would look to them for guidance in a crisis.

"But the Bearers have gone missing too."

That brought me up short. "What??"

"Whatever force abducted Celestia and Luna made off with Applejack, Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie as well," Jonquil said. "They disappeared right from their quarters. The Apples haven't seen hide nor hair of Applejack since this morning. The Pie family(2) says that they turned their backs for a moment and Pinkie was gone-- but they didn't think much of it till she'd been gone for over an hour..."

"Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie," Moth interjected. "They only suspected something was wrong when everything got quiet-- and stayed that way."

"And Fluttershy's guards say they heard her cry out, but when they broke into her room to investigate, she was gone," Jonquil finished as we approached the throne room's double doors.

I hit the double doors with my palms out. "Then who the devil is in charge right now?" I asked as the doors swung wide. I strode inside, and stopped dead in my tracks.

All around the throne room were the friends and family of the missing: the Apples, the Pies, the Cutie Mark Crusaders... even Angel Bunny was there. Seated on the throne was an alicorn I'd never seen before. She was a gleaming white, and wore a tiara studded with six very familiar looking gemstones. Spike was standing by her side, looking worried.

She got to her hooves and gave her elegantly coiffed purple mane a toss. "Oh, Arthur darling!" she said. "Thank heavens you're here at last. This is simply dreadful!"

I picked up my jaw and found my voice. "Rarity?"

 

 

 

---

 

1)Though they have, to my aggravation, risen and set from the same horizon on occasion. The summer sun celebration nearly unhinged my sanity. I was a gibbering wreck by the time Celestia broke down and explained it to me.

The explanation didn't help at all.

2)the redoubtable rock farming clan had been moved into the castle fairly recently as well. They were a bit more phlegmatic about leaving their farm unattended than the Apples had been; nothing much could interfere with rocks.